Electrical wire harnesses have been practically used as circuit components for a certain type of electrical machines and equipment, such wire harnesses having an electrical connector at one or both ends of a plurality of aligned wires. The wire harnesses are cut by the machine at a desired length of the plurality of aligned wires and assembled by terminating to an electrical connector at one end or electrical connectors at both ends of the wires. In this case, wires are continuously fed from wire supply units coupled to the harness-making machine.
Typically, the wire supply units comprise a plurality of wire-supplying drums, a wire-feeding roller, and a weight roller vertically slidably and supported to apply desired tension to the wires.
In assembling wire harnesses by feeding a plurality of aligned wires to the harness-making machine from the wire supply units, wire discontinuities are encountered due to exhausting all the wires on the wire-supplying drums or breaking of certain wires. When this happens, the wire harness-making machine and the wire supply units are stopped to take necessary measures so that the wires can be fed continuously before restarting their operations.
It is conventional practice to cut the non-broken wires so that the front ends of the non-broken wires are in alignment with the front ends of the broken and subsequent wires, including the wires supplied from the newly-added, fully-wound, wire-supplying drum. The group of wires with aligned front ends are then manually placed at the predetermined location in the wire harness-making machine. However, such conventional practice wastes wire. Alternately, only the broken portion of a broken wire is removed from the subsequent wire and the subsequent wire is carefully measured to be identical in length to the other wires before returning to the predetermined position in the harness-making machine. Moreover, such approach requires complicated steps to carefully pull the wire and is inefficient. The reason of carefully pulling the wire is to pull such wire through the weight roller without moving it so that the tension to the non-broken wires by the weight roller is not released while in turn not disturbing the proper alignment of the wires and consuming more time to correct the problem.